January 25, 2010

Cloud as Monetization Strategy for Open Source: SpringSource

I came across an interesting post by Savio Rodrigues from IBM. Savio writes about the recent announcement by SpringSource (now a division of VMWare) that they are proposing to move their dm Server product (the OSGi app server) to the Eclipse Public License (EPL). Until now the dm Server was offered with a dual-license model: free in GPL or with a proprietary license for a fee, also known as the "open core" model.

Rodrigues refers to a blog post by The 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett in which he says that SpringSource is abandoning the GPL license (and therefore the dual license model), because the EPL is more permissive and therefore encourages adoption. Rodrigues then brings up the possibility that the change in licensing is due to a change in business model -- generating revenues for sale of support subscriptions instead of license sales.

When VMware announced the SpringSource acquisition, delivering and
monetizing a cloud platform was a key component of their vision. It
doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that VMware is attempting to drive
dm Server adoption through the Eclipse Foundation and monetize the
adoption when operations team want to deploy dm Server applications on
Cloud infrastructure.

The monetization of open source software through cloud is something I've talked and written about before. And we can expect to see a lot more of it. Oh wait, we already are.

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Cloud as Monetization Strategy for Open Source: SpringSource

I came across an interesting post by Savio Rodrigues from IBM. Savio writes about the recent announcement by SpringSource (now a division of VMWare) that they are proposing to move their dm Server product (the OSGi app server) to the Eclipse Public License (EPL). Until now the dm Server was offered with a dual-license model: free in GPL or with a proprietary license for a fee, also known as the "open core" model.

Rodrigues refers to a blog post by The 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett in which he says that SpringSource is abandoning the GPL license (and therefore the dual license model), because the EPL is more permissive and therefore encourages adoption. Rodrigues then brings up the possibility that the change in licensing is due to a change in business model -- generating revenues for sale of support subscriptions instead of license sales.

When VMware announced the SpringSource acquisition, delivering and
monetizing a cloud platform was a key component of their vision. It
doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that VMware is attempting to drive
dm Server adoption through the Eclipse Foundation and monetize the
adoption when operations team want to deploy dm Server applications on
Cloud infrastructure.

The monetization of open source software through cloud is something I've talked and written about before. And we can expect to see a lot more of it. Oh wait, we already are.